Shifting Viewpoints

I just finished Chapter Six of Crocodile Princess out of a planned 26 or so Chapters. It looks like I might be writing mostly about book writing in this blog for a while, but we’ll see. I’m sure I’ll still touch on audio drama writing from time to time. In effect at the moment my Audio Drama writing is on hold while I focus on trying to crank out the novel as quick as I can. I want to get it done before real life interferes with writing, which should hit about the end of this month. If I can write roughly a chapter a day I can meet my goal, but we’ll see how things work out.

One interesting shift I’m having to make in novel writing is in the perspective department. In the Little Gou audio dramas I’ve been doing I’ve generally kept to the perspective of Little Gou- very little of what happens in them is outside of what Little Gou himself sees or hears. I do this mostly for simplicity and to make the story easier to follow, but I also enjoy working with a more limited viewpoint. (Even Twin Stars does this, very little in Twin Stars is outside the viewpoints of Tysen and Ping-An.)

With writing the novel I’m finding since the story is bigger I’m being drawn to cover more and more events outside of Little Gou’s viewpoint which is a bit of a change for me. For the most part the story still of course focusses on Little Gou and those with him, but as it goes on I find myself writing more things that occur outside his perspective and knowledge.

The other thing I’m finding myself dealing with while writing Crocodile Princess is trying to find my own writing style, as the writing style I’m using now is a mixmash of my own style combined with various authors I admire or have made a study of. In a single chapter there are sometimes subtle shifts in the way I present things depending on when I write it and what mood I’m in. For example, sometimes I dialogue out every word, but in other scenes I skip over unimportant dialogue with narration. Sometimes I as the writer make comments about the story, but other times it’s more detached and objective.

Most of this will be smoothed out during the editing process, of course, but it’s still interesting to see my own style shifting and evolving before my eyes as it develops.

Rob

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